Afraid of Snakes, Numb to Our Own Wildness
Happy screamed when she saw a snake in our courtyard last week—a small, harmless garden snake probably more terrified than she was. But she takes antidepressants daily without flinching, as if the chemical alteration of her brain chemistry is more natural than sharing space with a creature that belongs here more than we do.
We’ve learned to fear wildness in everything except our own suffering.
The snake represents something we’ve convinced ourselves is dangerous: unpredictability, natural behavior, life outside our control. We want everything domesticated, managed, contained. We’ve built a world where wild animals are relegated to zoos and nature documentaries while we live in concrete boxes, following artificial schedules, eating processed food, under fluorescent lights that never change regardless of season or weather.
Then we wonder why we feel depressed.
We are animals who have forgotten how to be animals. We’ve domesticated ourselves so thoroughly that our own natural behaviors feel foreign. We medicate anxiety instead of addressing the artificial environments that create it. We treat depression as a chemical imbalance instead of recognizing it might be a reasonable response to living in ways our bodies and minds were never designed to handle.
The animals we fear are actually free in ways we’ve forgotten how to be. That snake in our courtyard moves according to its own rhythms, responds to real threats rather than imagined ones, experiences each season as a different world. It’s not wondering if it’s living its best life or comparing itself to other snakes on social media.
We’ve created the safest, most controlled environment in human history, and we’re more anxious and depressed than ever. Meanwhile, wild animals face real dangers—predators, weather, scarcity—with a kind of presence and resilience we can barely imagine.
What if our fear of wild animals is actually fear of our own wildness? Fear of the parts of ourselves that can’t be scheduled, managed, optimized? Fear of the animal wisdom that knows when to rest, when to move, when to be alone, when to seek community?
We’ve domesticated ourselves into creatures that need permission to feel what we feel, validation to trust our instincts, medication to tolerate the lives we’ve created. We’ve become so detached from our own nature that natural behavior feels like dysfunction.
The snake didn’t need therapy to know how to be a snake. The birds building nests outside our window don’t suffer from impostor syndrome. The stray cats that hunt in our neighborhood don’t question whether they’re living authentically.
They know something we’ve forgotten: that mental health isn’t about perfect emotional control, but about living in ways that align with what we actually are rather than what we think we should be.
We fear wild animals because they remind us of what we’ve given up to feel safe. But safety isn’t the same as health, and control isn’t the same as peace.
Maybe the depression epidemic isn’t a malfunction. Maybe it’s our domesticated souls trying to tell us something about the cages we’ve built for ourselves.
